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A common complaint I get from students is that the hardware is not good enough. My response is that’s robotics: the hardware is never good enough. What I mean is that as a designer, you always have to work within limitations. Sometimes the joy is in getting a very simple robot to do amazing things.… Continue reading Paper prototyping for robotics

I’ve been teaching in the Cognitive Systems (https://cogsys.ubc.ca/) department for a number of years at UBC. My favourite course to teach is COGS 300: Understanding and Designing Cognitive Systems. It’s a big open-ended course, but the core lab project is building your own cognitive system by learning to make real, live robots. The students design… Continue reading Redesigning labs to include Reinforcement Learning

After I finished my work on the CuddleBits, I was given a new design task: how do we get a breathing robot that can bend at the same time? As a result, I had to learn about soft robotic design and ended up developing new ways of quickly prototyping carbon black and silicone-based sensors. We… Continue reading Building soft sensors into soft robots